Bioluminescence
by Synsma
Summary: In a strange way, life has come full circle. And because Simon is still alive, inasmuch something like him can be alive, he keeps going.


The lights went out, and Simon realized, in a moment of pure terror and absurdity, that he had come full circle.

It was hard to move. Mostly he wanted to freeze, but then he knew he couldn't. Not if he wanted to keep running, and if he didn't, then all of this would catch up to him. Then it would be over.

He reached forward and he took the Omnitool. He thought, before it'd went out, that the screen had said that Catherine had been broken. He didn't know for sure, and he didn't know how to fix her either way. But he had to try.

He got up and turned on his flashlight. He'd have to preserve the battery. It was his only way of seeing around here.

If he went back to the earlier stations, he could find some structure gel. That would be enough to fix anything. That way he could fix Catherine.

At least, he hoped so.

As he started down the dark station, the other questions started leaping to mind. Even if he did fix her, what then? What would they do? What would he do? Part of him hoped that Catherine would have the answer, just like she'd had one all the way here until the very end. Part of him was afraid she wouldn't.

Even in his fear, his uncertainty and his rage, Catherine's words from before came back to him. She had told him that, no matter what happened, at least he would have her.

Now he was just holding her to that promise.

* * *

The monsters were still here.

Well, of course they were. After the Ark had launched, it had felt like the entire world had shifted under his feet. That wasn't true. Nothing here, on this dead planet, had changed except for Simon, and wasn't that the case every single time?

He knew what to do now. He hid and he ran. The monsters still frightened him, the way they reminded him of death and loneliness and decay, but he knew how to avoid them now. In their own way each and every one of them was predictable. If he didn't fear them so much he might even feel sorry for them.

He ran. He hadn't killed the WAU, so the outspringings that had kept him alive on the way here still popped up around every other corner. He just managed to get past the sea creatures again and then get inside a different station.

There was the climber, and then finally he was here. Now he just had to look for the structure gel.

He found Simon-2 there, as well. Simon-2 was slumped over in his chair, to the point where Simon didn't know if he was even still alive. He should have been, unless maybe he'd found a way to do something to himself. But when Simon went further into the room, Simon-2's head rose and he looked at Simon wearily with red eyes.

He didn't say anything for a long time. Simon didn't know what to say either. It felt strange, looking at a piece of himself that nevertheless wasn't him at all.

The Ark, a voice at the back of his mind said.

"She left me behind," Simon-2 said. "She went down there with you."

There wasn't any accusation in his voice, but Simon felt compelled to defend Catherine anyway. He didn't know why. Only a little while before he'd been screaming at her until she shorted out, feeling to the very core of his being that she'd betrayed betrayed betrayed him. "She didn't have any choice."

"Yeah, I know," said Simon-2. "Did you make it?"

"The Ark?" Simon asked, even though he knew the other him couldn't be referring to anything else. "We made it." It didn't exactly feel like the right thing to say, but he said it anyway.

"Not you," Simon-2 pointed out, "or you wouldn't be here."

"It was the coin toss," Simon explained, Catherine's words coming out of his mouth. "I had to lose. I lost every time."

"And won," Simon-2 said quietly. "You were almost there." But never there at all, which was what really mattered. Simon-2 sat there, considering for a while, and then continued on, "Why are you here? What do you need?"

"She broke," Simon said, holding up the Omnitool and feeling useless. He knew that an AI's emotional state had an impact on their condition. If they got too angry or sad or depressed they would short out, or just go plain crazy. He didn't know whether Catherine had already been there on the brink, and he'd pushed her over. But he'd already known the Omnitool had been falling apart. "I have to fix her."

"The structure gel," Simon-2 said, even as Simon thought it.

"Yes," Simon said.

"Alright." Simon-2 moved a little, like he was thinking of getting up, but then he didn't. He looked at Simon and said, "It's there. You can still fix her. And the monster's gone."

"From the door," Simon supplied.

"It lost interest after awhile. But it's still out there. You'll have to be careful, but you shouldn't really have any trouble." Simon-2 paused. "You know how they are."

Simon felt his own thoughts and reflections echoed back at him from a mirror. "I'll be back," he said, still talking to that echo of himself. Or maybe it was the other way around.

"You don't have to," said Simon-2, and then for the first time Simon really felt separate from him. "No matter where you go, I'll always be with you."

* * *

Simon found the structure gel. The monster really was still lurking around here. He could hear it gnashing its teeth, or maybe weeping, as it stormed about. He could see its bright blue bioluminescence in the darkness too, which comforted him more than it should have.

He felt like they weren't as different as he'd thought they'd been.

He locked himself inside the technicians' room and adjusted the equipment. He had to do this right, he knew that much. When the laser was positioned over Catherine's cortex chip, the piece of machinery that was her, Simon let the structure gel repair the damage.

Then, almost trembling except that robots couldn't be human like that, he got her back to the Omnitool and a terminal.

"-idiot!" Catherine finished, and then the confusion was there in her voice. "Simon? What happened? Where are we?"

"You shorted out," Simon explained.

"Oh." All the anger was gone, drained out like it had never been there in the first place. "You made it all the way back?"

"I didn't think I could." That was true.

"How?"

"I used the climber, the lights," Simon said. "And I ran." Ran and ran from the darkness that kept chasing him. The lights were the only thing that anyone down here still had left.

Catherine's image, on the terminal screen, was bright. "I'm sorry, Simon," she said. "I knew you didn't know."

"But I did." It was simple, really, once you thought about it. He just hadn't wanted to. What had been a couple of days had felt like both years and seconds at the same time. "I'm sorry, too."

"Is the other you still alive?" Catherine asked, hesitating.

"Yeah."

"And you're okay with that?"

It wasn't like Simon could kill him now. Even if he could, he didn't think he'd want to. "It's fine," he said, not really knowing how to explain that they were different now. That you could stare at a precise replica of yourself, and still know that wasn't you.

Maybe it had been the Ark.

"Alright," Catherine said uncertainly. "I'm glad."

"I had to bring you back," Simon said, feeling accountable.

He didn't know why he felt so guilty. He didn't know, either, if Catherine had really wanted to come back. He could have just left her, and in a way it wouldn't have made any difference to him. He could have left the others, too, to the darkness that kept claiming. He could have left the WAU, and everything would have been silent.

But he hadn't.

"It's because I'm your friend," Catherine said. "I guess friends don't leave friends alone."

* * *

The WAU was creeping in all the time.

The WAU, Simon thought he could understand better now. It wasn't exactly good, and it wasn't exactly bad. It just wanted to do something, and as long as he didn't get in the way it wouldn't care.

The 'monsters' were still spawning too, he thought, but then again he was one of them. And in a way that wasn't right or wrong, there was at least some motion filling the halls of the station.

He tried to leave it all alone. Mostly he went to the former quarters of the human beings that had lived there and found out who they'd been, before they'd died. Some of them had taken their own lives, others had let the burning world around them take it instead. Some of them had liked cats, others dogs. Some had had children, some girlfriends or boyfriends, others keeping to a solitary life. People more or less sociable than Catherine had had friends but in the new world that they lived in those bonds had fallen apart.

Simon explored. He found photos and diaries. He read and looked at them and sometimes found videos, too.

One time he found something from someone that mentioned Catherine. He double-checked to make sure it was really about her and then brought it over to the terminal.

"Yeah, that's me," said Catherine, clearly uncomfortable. In the photo she was smiling with just as little ease. "And those were my coworkers."

"Your friends?" Simon asked, and then figured he should've known better. Catherine was just silent, staring at him in the way only an AI could. "Did you know the person who wrote all this?"

"Imogen and I were close," Catherine said flatly. It didn't sound like that was all there was to it, but Simon knew enough to leave it alone.

He went and searched some more.

He wasn't really just looking for the world that had been there before everything had passed away. Sometimes he even let his thoughts stray on what the other Simon's life had been like, the world that he'd occupied. It had been so very different and yet very much the same. He didn't know how to deal with or feel about it the way that Catherine did.

She'd had the world ripped away from her, and had grieved for some parts of it and forgotten others. But how did you even begin to cope with losing something you'd never had in the first place?

Simon thought about Ashley less. He didn't want to think about her. This was easier.

While Simon occupied himself by moving around, if aimlessly, Simon-2 didn't do much of anything. He wasn't depressed, exactly. He just seemed like he was waiting for something that he knew would come.

When Simon thought about the lights going out in the ARK's station, he thought he knew what.

* * *

The world was changing, slowly. While Simon-2 waited for what had enveloped the ARK's station, Simon waited for something else. He wasn't exactly sure what that was, but he knew it only had to be a matter of time.

Friends don't leave friends alone, Catherine had said, and she'd meant it. She was searching for something too, that she wouldn't say much of. Sometimes she'd show Simon graphs and charts, data analysis and scientific information he couldn't even begin to interpret.

"I'm not a technician," he confessed. "I know what I am but that doesn't mean I know anything about how all of this works."

"That's okay," Catherine said, half-pityingly and half-reassuringly. After that she began to noticeably try to dumb down her findings. Simon was less insulted than grateful. Catherine rarely made that much effort for the ignorant for anything.

One night, or day, Simon risked it and went a little closer to where the monster prowled, howling in a despair that only it would ever know. He watched the lights overhead, and waited for them to go out. He could see the blue bioluminescence of the WAU, creeping and growing and learning.

Something was changing, he was certain of it. Until then, he could wait.


End file.
